Work begins on new engineering building

By Carol Wood

Late Thursday afternoon, Hurricane Isabel swept over the University, bringing an evening of turmoil that left the Grounds without power until early Friday morning.
At about 6 p.m., roughly an hour after much of the University lost electricity, Leonard W. Sandridge, executive vice president and chief operating officer, pulled on his U.Va. Police raingear and set out on what would be the first of several Grounds tours he would make throughout the night.

He was not alone. Hundreds of University employees worked around the clock to keep patients and students safely sheltered and well fed. Full story.

Papers of civil rights pioneer who was denied admission come home to U.Va. Library

By Charlotte Morford

By 1934, the University of Virginia had been accepting female students to its graduate programs for nearly 15 years. Still recovering from the backlash that came with this policy (and its affront to views on the proper education of a “Southern gentleman”), the Board of Visitors received an application from Alice Carlotta Jackson, a 22-year-old Richmond native. Her application and the decision it prompted changed the state’s history.

Alice Jackson was the first African American to apply to a Virginia graduate school. She received a letter from the U.Va. board that rejected her on the basis of race as well as “other good and sufficient reasons.” She wrote back, asking for details so she could address those mysterious reasons, and her letter touched off a passionate and public debate that led to the passage of a law that paid black Virginians to attend graduate school out of state. That historic correspondence, and 60 boxes of related papers, photographs and other documents pertaining to her later distinguished career as an educator, were recently given by her family to the U.Va. Library. Full story.